The New York Times Employs Conservative Columnists?

All kidding aside, I was pretty disgusted when I read this op-ed in the NY Times, where Ross Douthat argues that Sarah Palin deserves our sympathy because she was the innocent victim of sexist and elitist attacks. Here’s a highlight:

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

There are many fascinating questions about sexism and elitism surrounding the media’s coverage of and the country’s reaction to Sarah Palin, but she was so spectacularly and uniquely unqualified for the position to which she was nominated that these issues are almost impossible to analyze.

Sarah Palin’s rise to fame is particularly infuriating because it allows conservatives to seem compassionate and concerned about sexism, despite the fact that they never once tried to call out the sexism in the public’s treatment of Hillary Clinton or any other democratic female politician for that matter.

Thinking about Sarah Palin makes me very sad, because I can’t believe that she is the woman who has somehow brought issues of media sexism to the forefront. Sarah Palin was mainly criticized because she was an idiotic choice for vice president. She was criticized for her own narrow-mindedness and lack of knowledge about the world and politics at large. She made a mockery of American politics.

There are, of course, many elements of her treatment by the media that I disagree with, but I just don’t think it’s worth spending the time critiquing sexism in politics by using Sarah Palin as a model. Let’s focus on the qualified, intelligent women who face immense amounts of sexism, such as Sonia Sotomayor.

Sarah Palin is bound to pepper the headlines until the news of her resignation and questions of scandal die down, but once we’ve had enough of that, I hope we can move on to more worthwhile discussions.